The Gold Room

In The Gold Room, Esther Shalev-Gerz invited five historians to unfold the potential stories of five objects they selected from the collection of the Swedish History Museum, Stockholm. The History, provenance, belonging and destiny of most of these objects have been forgotten and are hardly traceable.

The other five participants recently found refuge in Sweden. They had to decide very carefully what to take on the long journey of their flight. Through the stories about their one chosen object, they unfold their personal and worldly story of our time.

In the video and the photo series, a floating gold leaf covers a square at the centre of the image. The Surrealists’ photographic technique of solarisation brings together the negative and the positive of the image to this golden surface. Simultaneously flattening and bringing depth to the image, the solarisation creates an atmosphere of passage and mystery.

Testifying to the Scandinavians’ curiosity and fascination for different cultures, this project proposes a reading of the importance of the cultural value of the objects they brought back to their countries as reminders of their journeys and encounters. Shalev-Gerz thereby responds to Borges’ text The Scandinavian Destiny. The Argentinian author writes that the Nordic people travelled all over the world way before any other European, leaving behind them runes stones covered with images and writings. They never took countries. He never mentions them bringing back cultural objects. The artist discovered, just recently, that his gravestone in Geneva takes the form of a rune stone, identical to the one that guards the Gold Room in the Swedish History Museum.

Displayed in the Gold Room, these cultural objects from the past, with the five cultural objects lent by the refugees for the one-year exhibition contain in their folds the stories of those personal encounters and adventures.

The Gold Room was exhibited in the Swedish History Museum, Stockholm, Sweden, 2016-2017, in the Koffler, Toronto, Canada, 2017.